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When I watched the movie about the Siege at Jadotville, I lamented the fact that were no games to accompany my viewing. Move history forward a few years, though, and coverage for the events in what had become the formerly-Belgian Congo was solved by scenario creator Tom DeShetler and his work with Steel Panthers. That work is Scenario 172, DRAGON ROUGE (Red Dragon).

One of the ways to get around the fiddliness of off-board artillery is to have it all pre-configured. The scenario opens with a bombing attack of the town.

Throughout 1964, a communist rebellion raged against the government of Joseph Kasa-Vubu. The Simba rebels had coalesced around exiled political supporters of the murdered Patrice Lumumba and were backed by the communist governments of Russia, Cuba, and China. They quickly took control of roughly half of the Republic of Congo. With the national army of Congo letting the rebels capture territory largely without a fight, the government turned to mercenaries to combat the insurgents.

As the rebels captured territories, they took as hostages white Europeans. By late fall, the number was in the thousands with at least a thousand being held in Stanleyville. The government worked with the West to come up with a solution, one that ultimately consisted of a joint operation between Belgian troops, mercenary forces, and U.S. air support.

This is the first air drop scenario that I’ve played in Steel Panthers.

This scenario makes for a unique experience. Not only does it provide a look at a conflict that otherwise probably won’t see much game-wise (I don’t expect John Tiller to put out a $40 scenario package on the Congo Crisis), but it also has some unique features. It has a combined operation of mercenaries and the Belgians and a combination of para-dropped forces and some heavier vehicles. The objectives are interesting, both seizing territory and rescuing civilians (who are also represented on the map and controlled by the player). A few surprises also wait for the player as the scenario plays out.

One of the scenarios in Steel Panthers is a fairly obscure battle which took place in December of 1964. It is a portrayal of a Viet Cong (VC) attack on an Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) base during the period where the communists were moving towards a strategy of more direct military engagement on the battlefield. It is suggested that, against the AI, the player take the side of the ARVN.

My ARVN troops are well entrenched as the take on the communist human wave assaults.

The source material is a little thin on this assault, which took place near Tam Ky. That said, the size and scale of the Steel Panthers implementation seems about right to fully and accurately portray the battle. The game lasts for an hour and a half of real time, a reasonable duration to depict a sudden and overwhelming attack. The ARVN, at least (I don’t think the VC order of battle is in any way documented), is represented fully in a one-to-one ratio.

Being on the defensive, the player’s decisions are greatly simplified. Mostly, whenever it is your turn, you just have to designate targets for each of the units on your side. Occasionally it is necessary to pull a unit back out of an untenable defensive position, but for the most part remaining dug in is preferable to maneuvering around. As I’ve said before when it comes to Steel Panthers, managing the individual weapons and vehicles can be fun, but it gets tedious to visit every unit on every turn for, in this case, up to 31 turns in a row. To add to the tedium, the computer turns are incredibly long. As each VC attacker advances, they come under fire from multiple defenders. For all of the clicking and shooting, though, not much is really happening. Most of the time the VC units are halted and pinned down by our defenders.

This got me to thinking how this should be done right, given the capabilities of modern games. I’d say the scenario demonstrates that this is a very good size and scope for portraying Vietnam engagements. However, if a game simply brought the Steel Panthers graphics and UI into the current era, it would still suffer the tedium of all that micromanagement. Putting this scenario into an RTS would certainly move things along, but then you lose most of the fun (actually getting involved with the individual weapons) and create a click-fest hell for the player. There is a reason almost every RTS has a unrealistically small unit count.

The key here may be to simulate command, communications, and control in a realistic manner for the time and technology.

One example that might work with a turn-based game, otherwise mostly similar to Steel Panthers, is what is used in Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm. That system uses a special form of “WeGo.” That is, orders are entered, and then the resolution of those order are resolved for both side simultaneously. The catch in Flashpoint Campaigns is that the two players don’t enter their commands simultaneously. There is variability on how long between “turns” each player has, as well as a limit (not known upfront) as to how many units can be commanded.

In Flashpoint Campaigns, it is ostensibly modelling curtailed communications due to the jamming of signals on the World War III battlefield. Of course, this isn’t an effect that has actually happened, so we aren’t trying to accurately simulate the resulting communication issues. Rather, it is a matter of what makes for kind of a nifty game mechanic meshing pretty well with something that may well have been a major factor on the battlefield, had such a battle actually occurred in that time and place.

But what if we looked at the actual communications issues during the Vietnam era. For this case, let’s rely on the the LZ-XRay battle, because we are familiar with the issues of command having read the book. In that fight, Hal Moore had limited ability to command his platoons. He knew where he had sent them, but the details of his intentions were left to his captains and lieutenants to carry out. In the case of the “Lost Platoon,” the execution of the command was quite a bit different then the formulation of it. Further, once the chaos of battle hit, communications were dependent on radios and their operators. The radios could fail, sustain damage, or just not work properly. Operators could be injured or killed and then replaced, or not.

I can only begin to imagine what the details might look like, but it seems that a good system, based on commanders and communications, could simulate the tenuous ability to control across an entire battle of the size in these Vietnam fights. The added bonus is that the micromanagement goes way down and the amount of thinking and planning goes way up. If you are unsure whether you’ll be be able to command your units in the next round, or even when that “next round” will come, you have to be judicious about what commands you give.

Another possibility is the First Person Shooter (FPS). At the time Steel Panthers was fresh, the height of FPS technology was Doom II. Fast-forward 10-20 years and the FPS genre now encompasses commanding squads in a way that rivals an RTS treament of small-unit actions.

While there is FPS coverage of Vietnam, it is a little sparse. A 2004 release, Men of Valor, attempts to port the Medal of Honor style of gameplay from WWII to Vietnam. This is a treatment where a the player follows a scripted story; it is not means of reproducing battles. Several of the open-ended FPS games do have Vietnam mods for them. Notable to me is the project in ARMA, a user-created mod called Vietnam: The Experience. Notable because I’ve played ARMA. Red Orchestra has also been modded and released as the product Rising Storm 2: Vietnam. I note this one because it is a current and popular game. Unlike ARMA (in any of its versions), Rising Storm 2 is meant only to be an on-line multiplayer game. There is no single player.

While the sandbox style of ARMA provides a fair basis for a Vietnam mod, the issue of command and communication probably cannot be properly addressed without changes in the way ARMA does things. In ARMA 2 and 3, we are dealing with approximations of current or near-future wars. It makes sense that the ability to track and chat with your fellow players is an approximation of the technology available on the modern battlefield. In a Vietnam setting, would the same level of omniscience detract from the simulation aspects? Would it ruin a game if we had a heads-up display of how many of the “lost platoon” were still alive at any given point? Or is it still a decent approximation of how, via radio communication, information on battlefield communications was already coming into the modern age?

I’ll make an analogy with CMANO and its use for air and sea battles shortly after the end of the Second World War. The interface can still work provided that it is used only to show the lesser amount of information available to, for example, the Korean War commander. In this way, the game’s UI still approximates the level of information and control that that a real commander might have, using radio and a team of controllers. However, unlike the in a modern battle, where the CMANO interface closely approximates the computer display which a commander might be watching, the graphical UI in the context of the Korean War is simply that – a convenient interface. It detracts, rather than adds, to immersion.

So is it possible to create an immersive “commander” interface using a first-person display? What if you modeled the existing communications and the limitations that the radio places upon them. What if you were able to approximate the information flowing to and from you, as the commander. One might imagine an experience similar to the Scourge of War series. In the Civil War, you are commanding a Division or even a Corps, and the interface is more RTS than FPS. But in a small unit action, the first person interface might make sense. A Captain or a Major might even, if necessary, pick up an M-16 and fire some shots. Given a choice between the command interfaces of Scourge of War versions ARMA, I think I’d prefer the latter. This assumes, of course, that an era-appropriate method of simulating the difficulties of command and communication can be inserted. Dispatches are no longer sent around by riders on horseback, but there was still a reliance on “running” orders that should not be ignored.

The other part of the battlefield that I just don’t think ARMA simulates correctly is close artillery support. In We Were Soldiers Once…, Moore attributes his victory to his ability to direct artillery fire and air support. Doing this right would be a major step in moving away from a “Shooter” and towards a simulator of small unit actions. Doing it right might even trump what is the norm for tactical-level strategy games currently. Steel Panthers (and Squad Battles, too, for that matter) uses the system that exists in most World War II board games. There are spotter units on the board who, with line of sight to a target hex, can order in indirect fire. That fire comes with uncertainties in both timing and accuracy. Against a moving enemy, indirect fire is often ineffective. Contrast that to the descriptions in We Were Soldiers Once… of the use of Forward Air Controllers to bring support fire accurately and efficiently onto enemies with which the ground forces are directly engaged.

So while nothing out there is right on the money, it wouldn’t take that much to make an ARMA (or Rising Storm 2 perhaps*) into something that would allow the player to command small unit actions. Would that be a better interface than a traditional RTS (with which ARMA has some overlap, I might add)? Would it beat the traditional hex-and-counter implementation?

There must be a way to do this that is more fun than slogging it through, bullet by bullet, in a Steel Panthers scenario.

*The focus on ARMA, in part, are examples of custom scenario designs made for that engine. The continued relevance of Steel Panthers stems from the ability of users to create scenarios for an unlimited variety of situations. The key to a better future would be retaining that important aspect of the past.

I’ve read two mutually-exclusive assertions in articles about the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The first is that we were within a hair’s breadth of a full-scale military invasion of Cuba.

Essentially, this is based on the idea that the U.S. had available three responses to Soviet missiles in Cuba. The first was the blockade, redubbed a “quarantine” so as to make it not an act of war. The second was airstrikes against the missile launch sites to destroy them. The third option was an airborne and amphibious invasion of Cuba which would involve capture of the missile sites plus a regime change for Castro’s government. The non-response of taking no-action at all was ruled out.

The quarantine was put into place because it was a positive action, but the least-likely to lead to all-out war. Still, some advisors felt that the quarantine would be insufficient – that the Soviets were already well on their way to having first-launch capability from Cuba, even if no additional ships arrived from Russia. This faction demanded that, absent Soviet capitulation, immediate military action was required to be executed before the missiles could be rendered operational. Failure to act, and act immediately, would surely mean that the Soviets would initiate a first strike. Furthermore, in this analysis, air strikes were probably not a solution. No matter how thorough the bombing campaign, one could never know whether the missile threat was eliminated without also having boots on the ground at the actual missile sites to verify the missiles’ destruction. Thus the airstrike option would probably, inevitably, be followed by invasion.

Those backing a full-scale invasion likely did not see World War III as inevitable. Many simply did not believe that Russia would enter a global war over Cuba. Instead, the assumption was that the Soviets would leave Cuba to her own defense and retaliation would come elsewhere, perhaps via the closing of Berlin. Recovery from the situation could take place after the nuclear missiles in Cuba were no longer a threat. As proposed in Back Channel, there may have been others that figured the U.S. had such a military advantage that, supposing the Soviets actually decided to go to war over Cuba, this, too, would be a win for the U.S. Once the Soviets initiated World War III, we could bomb them back into the stone age and be rid of them.

So that’s one version that is suggested by a modern analysis.

As we know, the Russians did not challenge the quarantine and a 24-hour deadline, after which escalated military action was threatened. In the end, a negotiated solution was reached.

Other sources, however, suggest a second interpretation of the facts as they were.

In this analysis, an invasion of Cuba was never on the table. Not really. Instead, as the military ramped-up preparations, the problems with an invasion began to become clear. The ramp up was real – Marines were actually floating on transports ready to hit the beaches right up to, and beyond, when the Russians said they were withdrawing their missiles. But in this analysis, the sources say the infrastructure to support an invasion just wasn’t ready. For example, there was a shortage of the amphibious craft necessary to establish and maintain bridgeheads in Cuba. Similarly, the plan for “regime change” wasn’t mature enough to be implemented. The lack of an ability to replace Castro would have been a show-stopper when it came time to call Go/No-Go on an assault. We wanted to neutralize the threat from Cuba, not enter the quagmire of a new Cuban civil war.

Beyond that, we in the West can mix our interpretation of U.S. intentions with information recently extracted from formerly-secret Russian archives. Much more information about what the Soviets knew and did is available to us now. Certainly, we amateur historians know things that the politicians and planners didn’t know in the 1960s (or even in 1998*). We know that the Russians had considerably more troops in Cuba than the U.S. realized at the time, meaning the invasion would have been tougher for the U.S. than anyone anticipated. The U.S., while concerned about the strategic nuclear missiles, was also unaware of the extent to which the Soviets had also deployed tactical nuclear missiles. In fact, part of the defense plan against amphibious invasion was to use tactical nuclear weapons against the invaders as they came onto the Cuban beaches.

We also know that nuclear war was averted by the obstinance of a single man. A Russian submarine had been targeted by signalling depth charges (depth charges with the explosive power, roughly, of hand grenades) which did some minor damage. In 2002, the Russians revealed that their submarine was on the verge of launching a nuclear torpedo as a response to the perceived attack, but this particular submarine required concurrence of three officers (the captain, the political officer, and the detachment commander) instead of the usual two, because the commander happened to be on this submarine. While the captain and political officer were ready to launch, the deputy brigade commander demurred. In the end, no nuke was launched and the Russian sub surfaced and was able to flee the battle zone.

I was a little bit surprised not to find wargame simulations of the quarantine and the engagements that might well have broken out if the Soviet and American ships confronted each other directly. Perhaps there would have been no “fair” or interesting fights, at least at that time. What CMANO does provide is a scenario that simulates the finding and confronting of Russian missile sites, a confrontation that is imagined to take place well into the aftermath of the initial crisis. So I will use that one to represent the type of engagement that might have come out of problems with the quarantine.

Before I open up CMANO, however, I look at the full-scale invasion scenarios that are available in The Operational Art of War and in Steel Panthers. Together these two games supply bookends, exploring the opposite ends of the gaming scale for an invasion.

I’ve Got a Chance to Make It

One of the original scenarios shipping with The Operational Art of War is “Cuba 62,” a modelling of the U.S. invasion of the island. It is this one that is grounded most in “reality.” We are given approximations of the American invasion forces and the Cuba/Soviet conventional defenses and are set loose.

I tried to implement the actual U.S. invasion plan, at least as far as I could understand it.

The American plan was to concentrate all forces on the beaches between Havana and Matanzas. Following bombardment and aerial bombing for preparation, airborne units would drop inland of the assault locations and then the Marines would come ashore across a stretch of (at least what once was) resort beaches. This would allow rapid seizure of the port in Matanzas and the seat of government in Havana. At that point, army units could arrive via ship and secure the rest of the island. In the above screenshot, I am attempting to follow that plan, at least insomuch as I comprehend it and can cause it to be implemented in The Operational Art of War.

Despite having owned the game for decades, I’m still not really sure exactly how amphibious operations work within the game’s rules. In this scenario it seems possible to simply disembark in a Cuban port, assuming it is unoccupied by enemy units. Assaulting a beach? I’m not sure that is actually possible. I ended up moving all my Marines in via Matanzas and then all my Army units via the same port. This is the only option that matches the plan I’ve just outlined.

The Marines have responsibility for East of the bridgehead, the Army for West. My 101st boys pretty much got stuck behind enemy lines for the whole game, but came out none the worse for it.

As it turned out, concentrating everything at one point made for a slow-but-steady march towards victory. But it was a little too slow and steady. While I was gradually able to isolate and eliminate one commie strong point after another, progress wasn’t rapid enough to score a victory within the scenario’s parameters.

Victory required a rapid conquest of much of the island. I did not do that.

My first instinct, before looking through some details of the historic invasion plan, was to try to hit the island at multiple sites at once. I also assumed that the Guantanamo Bay force would be used to maximize initial success. The real plan, to contrast, called for a single point of invasion and had the Gitmo forces hold back until they could coordinate with the invasion’s ground forces. I think a multi-pronged invasion would be more successful within the TOAW construct, although I’ve yet to try it out. Even if it is, I don’t know what that says about it’s practical utility in the real world of 1962. One assumes the military planners knew things that a sandbox computer game wouldn’t.

“Cuba 62,” per my experience, is one of those scenarios where the U.S. has a decisive technological/organizational advantage and must use that to “beat the clock.” Back in 1962, Americans almost certainly assumed that such an advantage was theirs. The knowledge about Russian forces in Cuba far exceeding our estimates came later and one wonders how much that might have flummoxed the invasion plans (ignoring those tactical nukes, as we must). I didn’t try to see which “order of battle” this scenario uses for Russian units.

Another twist on this is that we now know that as Russia began moving towards a peaceful solution involving the removal of the missiles, Castro was pushing for open conflict. Have fended off the Bay of Pigs, he was happy to deal the U.S. another whooping. The Russians tried to explain to him that he would have very different results against the actual American Army and Marine Corps. So it is also possible that, while Soviet forces were present on the island, they might have refrained from direct involvement.

For some reference, the map is the same scale as for the Korean War map but with half-day turns (Korea was week-long turns). The scale does work as a game, but I’m not sure it really captures the feel of the fight as well as it could.

It’s Time for Me to Take It

Another version of the amphibious assault on Cuba is part of the vast user-made scenario library in Steel Panthers (WinSPMBT). The beach scenario is the first of four scenarios authored to explore a what-if invasion of Cuba. The full suite consists of the Marines on the beaches, two airborne landings, and one infantry fight. The scenario notes say the series was inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis -related campaign “Red Thunder”, made for the flight simulator package Strike Fighters 2.

Hit the beach! Marines come ashore on the swampy beaches near Matanzas.

This is a big scenario. It is a big map, for Steel Panthers (see the size of the tactical map versus the mini-map in the lower right corner, above, which is only about a quarter of the entire map), and a large unit count. Note that the screenshot is only about a quarter of the US forces. There are two invasion forces, one to the west and one to the east of the town of Cardenas, and we are only seeing about half of the western wing here.

It also is taking me a few turns to remember all the quirks of Steel Panthers. Checking every unit for suppression is something I’d forgotten about (maybe willfully). The multi-turn process of using indirect artillery requires acclimatization as well.

The Steel Panthers take on this is much the same as Steel Panthers always is. Controlling the units down to the platoon level is generally fun. Steel Panthers is also big enough to capture the full scope of a tactical battle without necessarily scaling down the unit size and map scale. Even though battles often do just that. This being purely-hypothetical, there is no way to say whether it is “to scale” or abstracted. The scenario requires that Marines take a coastal town by landing on the beaches to either side. They then must rush to seize the town within about an hour and a half of landing. Is that a feasible plan? Maybe, if we are relying on shock and awe to achieve quick victory. It also might be better to establish organization upon landing, and then advance in an organized way. Take 5-6 hours instead of 1.

The downside to having the ability to play with every weapon in every unit is that you’ve got to cycle through every unit, every turn. That isn’t so fun. Beach landings can be especially tough because once you’ve emptied your transports, they are still there waiting to be “visited” every turn. For me, when I play Steel Panthers, I’ve found its more important to play the units in the order that the game has them in (next unit) than to try to use them by function or command organization. Otherwise, in a large scenario like this, it becomes too easy to lose track of which units have moved and which still have yet to be commanded.

I can only imagine that the Command Ops engine would be a wonderful treatment for this fight. In many ways, an invasion of Cuba looks similar to Crete (a major focus in the Conquest of the Aegean product.) Besides the fact that it would be an awful lot of work (a map of Cuba plus a 1962 Order of Battle!), the Cold War combatants circa 1962 may have advanced in technology enough to make a World War II game engine unsuitable. In playing the TOAW version I used, with as much frequency as I could, the helicopter insertion capability available in the scenario. As I’ve talked on about before, in TOAW a key gameplay element in the game is to occupy all six hexes surrounding an enemy position before attacking. Helicopter movement becomes a great way to get a just-strong-enough unit into that sixth hex to allow an enemy to be eliminated. I’d imagine that modeling helicopters, and getting it right, is something that the Command Ops engine is just not going to do without further development.

I Know What I Would See There

So lets switch over to Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations.

As I said, there aren’t any currently-available scenarios covering the crisis itself. What is available is a user-made scenario dealing with a similar crisis, something just under a year after the real events. The player commands a naval task along with air support and is tasked with determining what the Russians have lurking around the Caribbean as well as to check whether there really are missile launchers on Cuba.

Almost a year later, and the CIA still suspects the Russians of putting missiles in Cuba. I guess the resolution didn’t take.

This is a hypothetical, and one pretty far afield from the actual missile crisis. Set aside the fact that the Russians complied with the missile removal and then some**, if I had to speculate on the nature of a follow-on to the Cuban Missile Crisis, I would expect it to be fast and furious. If the U.S. became aware of Russian non-compliance, they probably wouldn’t have poked around with a few air and sea assets. Given that Russian non-compliance came with an threat of immediate nuclear war, I’d expect a second Cuban Missile Crisis to escalate far faster than the first.

Of course, another way to interpret this scenario is that what the Cubans have there are those Russian missiles that, back in the real world, had been removed even though we didn’t know about them. If one assumes that they might have been left in place, one could imagine that, a year on, we slowly develop suspicions about them and once again commence the process of identification. Then, as before, we might try to deal with them through diplomatic channels, considering military action only as a last resort. No matter what, I have to think that once a Cuban/Soviet aircraft let off a missile aimed one of ours, we’d no longer be limiting our response to four ships and a dozen or so aircraft. But this is the scenario I’ve got and I’m going to play it.

In many ways, the scenario is really a Vietnam situation on a “hypothetical” map. The mix of aircraft is that of the early escalation of the Vietnam War. You have your Douglas F3D flying with an electronics warfare package. They support Vought F-8 Crusaders, the bulk armed for combat but others stripped down to be used for photo-recon. We expect to face a enemy force of MiG 15s, 16s, and 17s. The naval support is sparse, particularly given the availability of assets this close the continental United States. Much like Vietnam and Korea before, the United States assumes complete superiority in sea assets.

The instructions, as is common for CMANO scenarios, have us trying to locate the hostile materiel located somewhere in Cuban waters. I am told I should locate the missile launchers and then “wait for further instructions***.” In the meantime, the MiGs decide I’m becoming annoying and try shooting down some of my aircraft. Already, this war is going far further than the original Cuban Missile Crisis ever did.

They mostly come at night. Mostly.

After some back-and-forth shooting, in which I had the upper hand, the sun set on the Caribbean and decided I’d try to wait it out until the next morning to resume the search in the light of day. My fears that this would be another scenario where I simply would be unable to complete the objective were unfounded. Once night fell, two unknown ships began approaching my task force from out of the blackness. The fact that they were emanating weapon targeting radar pretty much let me know they were bad guys, but being the good guy here, I couldn’t really go after them until I had a positive identification. Or until they began shooting at me, which they did.

A few minutes later I identified the ships as Russian, a frigate and a light cruiser. Yikes. I had terrible flashbacks to the Waller Takes Charge scenario where I ended up being thrashed by the superior Soviet gunnery. It also means I’m in a shooting war, not just with Cuba, but also with the Russians. You’d think the President would release more air and naval assets, wouldn’t you?

Anyhow, there is a point where you are toe-to-toe with your enemy and you’ve just got to duke it out, because turning tail and running won’t leave you any better off. In this case, numbers prevailed over size. I won’t go into all the details, because the core of this scenario is discovering what’s out there, but I did manage to pull off the “Major Victory” as defined by the scenario author.

As far as these scenarios go, this one was pretty enjoyable. I have to say it was on the easy side, given my win. In the end, I lost a few planes and took a lot of damage to my ships (3 out of 4 were dead in the water by the end, although all could be repaired), but I gave quite a bit more than I got. Of course, now we’re in a hot war with the Cubans AND the Russians, and Cuba has nuclear missile launchers ready to go. I guess its time to roll out that invasion scenario from the top of the article.

All of these “might have been” scenarios, while maybe not that much of a possibility, are still grounded in the real world. In my next article, I’ll take a look into the realm of pure fantasy regarding the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

*The passing reference to 1998 refers to the initial release date of The Operational Art of War and the initial version of this scenario.

**There were missiles in Russia of which the United States was unaware. The Soviets could plausibly have kept them there and, if caught, simply said that they weren’t part of the original deal and pushed for more concessions from the U.S. Further, evidence suggests the Russians were driving for an avoidance of escalation by threatening to abandon Cuba, all outside of U.S. diplomatic pressure.

***For what its worth, no “further instructions” were forthcoming. I took the scenario description at face value and did not take any action against the Soviet missile sites. I don’t know if the intent was execute an airstrike.

While Bir Gifgafa seems to be the most modeled battle of the Suez Conflict, it isn’t necessarily the best from a player’s perspective. Several other battles present more interesting fodder for wargaming.

New Battle, New Game

Taking a look at a new gaming system, I tried John Tiller‘s Modern Campaigns, the Middle East ’67 product. This is one of the products that carried over the HPS Sims days, but with a twist; it has also been released for tablets and that is the version that I got.

The mobile versions of these games are not a straight port. In this example, ME ’67 for the PC offers 37 scenarios whereas the mobile version offers 17. Also, the PC version comes with editing tools, whereas the tablet would seem to be a what-you-see-is-what-you-get situation. However, the mobile versions are considerably lower priced to make up for it – $39.95 versus $2.99.

Armor to the rescue at Abu Agheila.

The engine is somewhere between the grand tactical games of the previous article and the full war. In fact, it is within the smaller end-of-the-scale of what is done with The Operational Art of War. By comparison with the TOAW scenario on the same subject, it is about twice the granularity. Here hexes represent one mile (as compared to 2.5 km) and the time scale is 3 hour turns (as compared to 6); although such a comparison is less clear when you factor in TOAW‘s split turns. Unit sizes are generally the same (infantry in battalions), although ME ’67 appears more likely to have the occasional smaller scale units. I also noticed, in the options, the ability to split units (also an option in TOAW). I’ve never used it in playing either game, but in just a quick try, the TOAW units can be split (arbitrarily, not by company) whereas that doesn’t seem to be an option for the identical units in ME ’67.

Comparing and contrasting, ME ’67 is a more focused product, and it has some details to show for it. For example, the day/night cycle that I complained about in the TOAW version is now included. Two turns per 24 hours (at least in the scenarios I’ve tried so far) are night turns, which are distinguished by reduced visibility and no air support. The details of combat are more obvious in the reporting (the number of men/vehicle kills are highlighted with every attack), whereas TOAW is tracking squads, but I’d be surprised if the under-the-hood accounting is all that different. Also in both, all units except artillery have an attack range of 1 hex. Finally, more in line with the grand-tactical games, ME ’67 makes the distinction between ranged fire and assault by deliberately conducting Divided Ground-style assaults.

One of the complaints I have about the Tiller games is that they tend to be fairly confined scenarios. Movement rates are small enough relative to the duration of the scenarios that your path to victory from the initial setup is rather focused. It is likely an AI thing: if a player could collect up all his troops and swing them around to the rear of the enemy position for an a-historical attack, the AI would probably react very wrongly to it. It also seems that often the “challenge” of the scenario is imposed by the turn limit. In the scenario shown above, this latter wasn’t the case. I had enough time to do what I needed to do. The first observation applies though; there aren’t a lot of options outside of the historical battle – as Israeli, I split my forces and attack using both of the roads headed into the pass.

As a product, it does handle the 1956 war just a tad better than the TOAW version. I’m not sure that is does it $39.95 better. In fact, one of the attractions of this game is that it is on the tablet, and it is a break from the mouse-heavy play of everything else I have. That said, the touch-screen interface is a little quirky. Movement is a press-down until a unit is selected, at which point you can (by continuing to press) create a movement path. It is easy to do it wrong, and that can be annoying. Otherwise, it makes a pretty decent “casual” mobile game.

Last comment is that this is Middle East ’67. Although there are three scenarios for the 1956 conflict, the bulk of the scenarios are for later wars, and so I do plan to be coming back to this one.

Testing 1-2-3

Given the lopsided loss for the Command Ops scenario based on this war, I decided to run a test. Rather than mix the results of terrain, attack/defense, and unit capabilities all at once, I wanted to see a straight-up comparison of the unit capabilities, Israel versus Egypt.

I created a test map, with a large flat area so that line-of-sight would not be an issue. The forces (armor only, no resupply) deployed with the player assuming control near sun-up. Both sides have an objective at the center of the map, so that each side must move towards engagement and duke it out.

The map is mostly flat, though I added some hills and canyons for aesthetic purposes. My armor moved towards the objective (that white square with the blue arrow) in column, and met the enemy coming the other way.

Daylight and lack of terrain features meant that that I had knowledge of the location of the approaching enemy force throughout. About 2500 meters, my units began engaging. This was outside of the effective range of the Egyptians, and they did not return fire. This is much more in line with what I’d expect than my previous version of the scenario.

I also noticed another interesting and, to me, unexpected feature of the game. Once the shooting starts, the ongoing combat disrupts the line of sight and, correspondingly, intelligence about the enemy. The black-outline to the southwest of the lead enemy unit is showing that I previously spotted a unit there, but its current location is unknown. Off the scope of this screenshot, the entire tail of the enemy column was lost once the shooting started, even though it was well within range of sight before.

I am continuing to engage the enemy outside of their effective range. To gain further advantage, I’m disengaging part of my line to extend to my left. The red mark is the game’s representation of my friendly fire.

As I am able to bring my tanks into range, the battle continues as I would expect based my experience with the Bir Gifgafa encounter in other games. As a note, I did not try to tweak the parameters to achieve my results. The Soviet data are from the Germany scenario I played earlier and the Israeli guns are using data for the German 75, upon which the French design was based.

I do appear to have flummoxed the AI. In the above screenshot, while I have deployed my units outside of the enemies range in a line, he appears to have trouble coming out of column and, even after several hours and many losses, has yet to close to his own engagement range. But that wasn’t what I am testing. I just want to see if the Israeli range advantage comes through in the modelling, and it does seem to.

I feel the need to press the attack, so I’m ordering my units to close the distance. This increases the damage I’m doing to the enemy (yellow crosses = destroyed Egyptian units), but I’m now taking return fire and own-side losses.

By mid-afternoon, perceiving I have the advantage, I begin to push forward to seize the objective and eliminate the enemy. Once again, I do see the expected behavior. Once I get into the 1500m range, the return fire from the Egyptians becomes effective.

One major difference in this scenario is the speed of the encounter. Whereas all the other models of this battle keep it within an hour or two, we see in this screenshot has it at about 2PM, having been engaged since 10AM. Obviously, there is nothing implausible about a slower pace. If the commanders do not push the engagement, things may well move slowly. In the end, the Egyptian commander surrendered to me right around sunset. And by surrender, I would assume the game means “conceded victory” by withdrawing, as opposed to turning over all his arms and men.

Riffing on Rafah

Another battle that has treatments from multiple games is the taking of the fortress at Rafah in the Gaza strip.

A 1956 U.S. Army map from just before the war shows Rafah, the 1948 Armistice Line, and the surrounding territory.

In the north, the opening move for the Israelis in the 1956 war was to seize the fortress at Rafah. This separated the remaining Gaza forces from Egypt, allowing Israel both to strike West into the Sinai, and to isolate and destroy the remaining forces in Gaza. The fortress complex was defended by the 5th Infantry Brigade, a mix of Egyptian and Palestinian forces.

Although the initial phases of the operation were deep in the Sinai, arguably the entire raison d’être for the invasion was the occupation and pacification of the Gaza strip. Although, in the event, this battle was a complete Israeli victory (less than 10 casualties), it was nevertheless a critical battle in achieving Israeli success.

The battle for Rafah as portrayed in Divided Ground. The 2D view shows the full scope of the battle, with the Israeli’s striking simultaneously from 3 directions.

Divided Ground has this scenario, and it provides an excellent fit for this engine.

Without buying some more books on the subject, I have only hints at the actual timeline of the battle. It appears that the battle started during the night before, as Israeli engineering units infiltrated the enemy lines and cleared the mine fields. The main attack came after daybreak, and consisted of a rapid, mechanized assault on the Egyptian fortifications.

Comparing and contrasting two versions of this scenario is an illuminating exercise. The Divided Ground scenario (a modified version* of the default scenario, again by Alan R. Arvold) is at the upper end of what is appropriate for this engine. The game duration is about 2 hours, beyond which simulating logistics becomes important in a scenario.

The killers awoke before dawn. The sun has yet to come up, and already my assault has made a hole in the Egyptian position.

The ME ’67 scenario runs eight turns, the two nights bookmarking the actual day of the battle. Approaching the Egyptian positions and even the initial assaults occur during the night turn, while the bulk of the fighting takes place throughout the day.

So which of these two takes comes closest to getting it right? And by right, do I mean which is more historical? More fun? More instructive?

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. I think many grand-tactical scale war games create scenarios “representative” of battles, rather than trying to nail down the details. Was the battle really fought in a two hour period, start to finish? I doubt it. But the pace of the actual assault may well have been that a two-hour time limit is appropriate.

Examining the two scenarios side-by-side, you can see they model the situation very similarly. The finer grain of the Divided Ground version allows for some additional details. For example, there is an armored car unit, represented as two “stands”, on the board. In the ME ’67 game, these perhaps wouldn’t show up as a separate company in the order of battle.

Divided Ground is more fun, and probably a better all-around way to deal with an engagement like this. While the length of the battle more more accurately captured at the operational level, the pace of the battle is probably not. The player slowly moving his armor through the Rafah fortresses does not strike me as how the battle should be portrayed. This should be an example of using mobile warfare to defeat fixed fortifications, and that doesn’t simulate well using dice rolls comparing attack and defense values. Furthermore, the much of the fun comes from the different equipment between the sides. Israel, unable to get her hands on state-of-the-art Western hardware, mixed and matched to create some unique weaponry. Doesn’t the player want to get hands on this equipment, actually interacting with range and firepower and lethality?

Of course, Divided Ground itself is quite an abstraction. Although I’m moving 3D tanks around the “board,” these are all representative of small units. Each “turn” I get two “shots” from my tank against the enemy, but that represents what? How many of my, say, 5 tanks are engaging with how many rounds? It may be a “better” way to play this battle, but is it in any way optimal?

As an aside, I do notice that I was completely unable to reproduce the historical result of minimal Israeli casualties. I lost a bunch of men and equipment in the approach, including having trucks destroyed with infantry on board. In the ME ’67 version, by contrast, claiming all the victory locations with minimal losses pretty much is necessary for victory.

Playing this in Divided Ground does make me wonder whether I should be buying the revamp, Campaign Series Middle East. After fighting not just the enemy, but software oddities (one turn I watched an Arab truck just go back and forth between two hexes, until in ran out of movement) and operating system glitches, the improvements in the newer version start to look really appealing. However, as some of the online reviews pointed out, you are buying basically a modded up version of a 20-year-old game – in this case a 20-year-old game I’ve already paid for. As was said, it’s the kind of thing you’d expect to find for under $10 on Steam. Even at that price, it may be one of those games that you’d wait for the Steam sale. For $39.99?

Mini Me

To get involved with each vehicle and each shot of the main gun, a player needs to break out Steel Panthers.

The size of the Rafah battle, as portrayed in the previous two engines, exceeds what is appropriate for WinSPMBT. Instead, a scenario explores an engagement that occurred immediately after the victory at Rafah. As the defenses at Rafah began to come apart, Moshe Dayan sent the light tanks (AMX-13s) along the coast to take al-Arish. At roughly the right edge of the the U.S. military map, above, the Israelis ran into prepared Egyptian defenses.

The resulting WinSPMBT scenario looks something like Rafah in miniature. The defensive positions are smaller and the attackers are fewer, and there aren’t 3+ axes of attack to manage.

Rushing the wire. I replayed this scenario half a dozen times, trying to figure out how to get close to the historical outcome.

Nevertheless, the shot-by-shot version of this fight gets a bit tedious, compared to the higher level simulations. It doesn’t help that I find this scenario (called Road to el-Arish) very difficult to play. Completely uncharacteristically for me, I tried the scenario something like six times in a row in an attempt to figure it out. Without success, I might add. What gets me is that, not only did Moshe Dayan crack this nut, again winning the battle with minimal losses, but the player is expected to get an overwhelming victory as well – the instructions say anything less than a 2:1 Israeli point victory should be considered a loss.

Since I don’t know what exactly the answer is, I can only speculate. But I think managing the line-of-sight from potential enemy positions is probably a key, and is something that isn’t easy when it to the ancient UI of WinSPMBT.

*I’m actually not entirely sure which version of the scenario I’m playing, the stock or the revised one. See the notes (albeit for a newer version than the Divided Ground one) for differences between the two.

In the last post I complained that, although the TOAW scenario gives a good overall picture of the encounters in the 1956 war, it does not convey the “feeling” of this fighting, and which would require gaming at a finer level.

Back near the beginning of this series, I dug out my Arab Israeli Wars (the board game) and set up scenario B-1. Apparently, I’m not alone as there are many games that look at that battle, several of them having been directly inspired by the Avalon Hill scenario. The board game is not designed for solitaire play, and this scenario in particular does not lend itself for playing without an opponent. Nevertheless, when I set it up and fiddled around with it for a little bit, it immediate began to look like an Israeli victory.

Being scenario B-as-in-Basic #1, you would think you’d find it a simple, well-balanced scenario suitable for new players learning the game. It does not appear to be this; my impressions of the scenario find it extremely tilted toward the Israelis. See this thread at Board Game Geek for a bit of discussion on the scenario. I suppose it may have another purpose. A section of the design notes begins with a story of an October, 1973 battle where 5 Israeli tanks are sent to engage 40 Syrian T-55s. After 45 minutes (a typical scenario length in this type of game), half of the Syrian tanks were destroyed and the remaining retreated, without a single Israeli loss. One wonders if part of the purpose of B-1 is simply to demonstrate the massive superiority of Israeli armored doctrine, even when “the numbers” suggest an advantage to the other side.

Divided Attention

The first computer version I played was for Divided Ground. As I mentioned in my previous look at Arab Israeli War scenario conversions, these scenarios contain extensive design notes. In those design notes, the author makes a comment that the purpose of his conversions are to implement the board game scenarios. If a player wants good Divided Ground scenarios, either versus the computer or to compete with an opponent, he says they should look to the scenarios supplied with the game. This conversion may be a good example of what he is talking about.

A turkey shoot. Despite the “light tank” designation, the superior gun (and doctrine) of the AMX-13 makes short work of the Egyptian T-34/85s.

The victory conditions, rewarding destruction of the enemy and the success or failure of traversing the board within the allotted time, are reproduced faithfully. But a problem in this conversion seems to be that the computer opponent doesn’t really understand them.

Assuming that the scenario is, in fact, winnable as the Arabs, the key would be to use terrain to ambush the approaching Israeli’s once they are in range. Using such a strategy, the computer version might make it possible for Arab units to remain hidden (via the fog of war feature) until they are close enough to neutralize the range advantage of the Israelis. Instead, the AI Arab player seemed to bunch up his units, leaving them in place to be destroyed at leisure from a distance. Even more glaring, the Arab player dealt with the exit conditions by stacking his units on the exit hexes, making them easy targets once good firing positions were determined.

Steel Panthers: MBT

The Star and the Crescent

Command Ops 2

Battlefield size*: 40km x 12km
Game length: ~12 hours
Unit: Platoon

Moving on to the Steel Panthers version, we again encounter a scenario “inspired by” the Avalon Hill scenario, rather than being actually based off of it. The mix of tanks are about right, but there are far fewer (owing to the smaller scale). Here terrain doesn’t have the same feel. While the sand and rocky hills are still there, it doesn’t have the “hexside” ridges of the board game.

The inspiration does take one odd form. The map layout is with North to the left and a fairly narrow playing space West-to-East. On the top (that is, West) edge of the map is the Suez Canal, not used in the game. You might recall that the original scenario uses the Suez Canal mapboard to add extra playing space, but the canal features themselves are not playable. The battle took place quite a ways distant from the canal, and it is only in this scenario because the board game must create all of the battles using the same four mapboards.

One other oddity. The battalion commander has a jeep at his disposal. For some reason, when moved, the jeep makes horse noises. Fortunately for my sanity, the jeep got stuck in the sand within the first few minutes of play.

The scenario said to play from the Egyptian side. Maybe I should have paid attention.

The scenario played out much as the Divided Ground. Kills were made at long range with very little own-losses. In a similar way, the enemy bunched up around a couple of victory locations, where they were subsequently destroyed.

I Want to Love You, But…

The 2005 release from Shrapnel Games, The Star and The Crescent promises to be what we’re all looking for here. While primarily focused on later wars, it too has a Bir Gifgafa scenario for 1956. Immediately on start, we notice the increased use of realism in this version. Instead of randomly-generated desert or a reproduction of “Board D,” the scenario is played using a Soviet contour map of the battlefield. Unfortunately, it is a 1980s Soviet map of the battlefield so, for example, it has a airfield that didn’t exist in 1956. A hint of things to come.

The Star and the Crescent itself the fifth game released on that engine, which started with BCT: Brigade Combat Team or BCT: Commander (depending on the version) from 1998. While I didn’t collect ’em all, as they say, I do have several versions of this system. This game system is the one that finally drove me over the edge regarding left-handed mouse issues in gaming. Much of the Shrapnel line has long insisted on making the mouse buttons non-configurable. In this series it was particularly galling to me because the interface is so mouse-click intensive.

Amazingly, there is a particular combination of installations and patches that solves the problem. My computer has both The Star and the Crescent and Air Assault Task Force, installed together and both patched up to the latest post-release versions. Running with both, and then launching the TSatC executable (with the current patch) presents a native windows interface. Launching from the AATF executable presents a custom GUI that defiantly eschews integration with Windows. The mouse buttons are locked, as is the screen resolution. Several times in the past I’ve gotten stuck on that interface, unwilling to try to learn the actual game. Fortunately, this time around, I stumbled upon the workaround.

But once the game starts running, we find other problems. It is not a pretty game, by anyone’s definition. But that’s OK. Pretty isn’t necessarily what we’re after. The game was sold as a hard-core sim for hard-core wargamers, so it must be judged as such. The problem is, again, the user interface. At start, all units are halted and without orders. Trying to assign those order tumbles one into a nightmare-like cycle where orders are given, wait, no they weren’t, try again. There, got it. Nope. Try again.

The blue highlighted in green is the lead company of AMX-13s. The black squares to my NW are the enemy that I dispatched, while losing two of my own (gray squares). The blue squares back up the road to the NE are so far behind because of trouble getting orders. Note the ghost-of-the-future airfield to my South.

Suddenly one vehicle out the unit starts moving… but not the rest. Oops, wrong click – try again.

I suppose I should be spending more time with the written manual. But every time I read the manual, the prose regales me with how easy and intuitive the user interface is, rather than giving me the secret to overcoming its hurdles.

Ultimately, once all the units have the right orders – the desired formation, a path plotted in roughly the right direction, and not halted, subsequent orders become a little easier. It is simpler to modify existing orders than it is to create new ones.

A section from a 1959 US Military map of the Sinai hints at what we are up against. “Very Sharply Undulating” terrain. Another section, closer to the battlefield, describes “Sand Dunes 30 to 45 meters high.”

The simulation certainly does seem to be well done. Modeling looks to be at the level of individual shots from individual vehicles. The control, however, can be per vehicle or at the higher-level commands using formations. The friendly UI isn’t at the level where units can take their own initiative, but the game is best played giving orders at the company level and leaving the computer to execute them. The modeling of the map seems to be well done also. The terrain modeling appears to be at a finer detail than most games at this scale, leaving a battlefield peppered with undulations and providing complex fields of fire to navigate.

Pretty much done. The red Xs are killed enemies and the blue Xs are killed friendlies. My units (the blue armor symbol) are headed towards the end of that objective arrow.

Results were similar to the other three versions of this battle. The Israeli armor dominated the battlefield, dispatching the enemy with minimal friendly losses. Engagement distances were closer than the previous versions, something I attribute to the finer-grained modeling of the terrain. I do also notice the max-range for all tank guns is set at 1600, shorter than in the other games and closer than some of the kills in Steel Panthers.

In digging through the statistics, I came across another issue I have with the scenario. The scenario puts a 90mm gun on the AMX-13. This is an upgrade that the French were rolling out in the 1950s, but if the Israelis had any at the time of the Suez Conflict, it was only one or two. All the information I’ve seen says the light tanks of the 7th Armor Brigade mounted the 75mm gun, sharing it with the M50 Super Shermans.

But wait, there’s more! Just as I was headed into the endzone, one more company of enemy armor appeared. Shouldn’t be an issue.

One big plus I’ll give this to the system. Once I killed a couple of the tanks in the above screen shot, the game ended. As the program described, it had now become impossible for the enemy to achieve its objectives. It saves the player from the unpleasantness of having to run out the clock on a scenario he knows is over.

The single 1956 scenario in this package may not represent the gaming system’s best face, so I’ll give The Star and the Crescent/Air Assault Task Forceanother look in the future.

Roll Your Own

The final look at this battle was using the editing tools of Command Ops 2 to recreate the situation. For an engine of its complexity, the scenario tools are surprisingly simple to work with. The game’s creator says his intention was that you could produce an interesting scenario in minutes, allowing you (for example) to imagine what a hypothetical meeting engagement between two arbitrary forces would look like. The details can be increased from there. There is a huge latitude for control of the AI (enemy and friendly) by setting the victory locations and this is a method that is vastly simpler than the scripted AI of other products. Under pressure from the users, everything in the engine is editable, allowing us to move from the WWII, Western Front setting to 1956 Egypt.

The most difficult part of the game to create fresh are the maps. Getting them right takes some time and effort. When I first started with some map creation, I was having trouble getting a non-Northern Europe based terrain. I decided to forgo it for this iteration, and used instead a user-created map for the battle of El Guettar.

Adding vehicles for the Arab Israeli War was fairly straightforward.

This was by far and away the best interface experience for playing this battle. I set the unit size for the battle to correspond to the board game/Divided Ground. Commands can be given at any level from that unit on up, including simply commanding the entire force. The typical game length for Command Ops tends to be pretty long. The larger forces and multiple objectives require several distinct planning/execution phases and, at least for me, it takes quite some time to play through. However, a small scenario like this plays out very quickly.

Engaged. Once again, the AI has clumped up their armor, this time at a choke point behind a Tunisian crossing. Judicious use of victory point location placement is what drives the AI in this game.

The battle went mostly as I’d expect. It ended up being a significant loss (although as I was haphazard assigning victory points, calculations of win and loss are probably not meaningful). The kill ratio was somewhat lopsided in favor of the Egyptians, and the Israelis failed to take the bridge. I’m left with a few conclusions about the use of this engine for post-WWII scenarios.

It is well suited to this time and place. The use of post-WWII equipment was not a stretch for the engine. However, this scenario does show where the limits of this system might be found.

The map seems to be on the larger size for a typical Command Ops battle, which as I’ve said tend to be multi-day affairs. Take a look the table near the top of this article. Granted the map was oversized for this battle, but we can see that this size battlefield is more like the multiple-hour versions of the battle rather than a multiple-days version (which would pretty much cover the whole war). While this might be the size of an area for an extended operation for a airborne assault force (using primarily foot movement) against a fortified defense, things are different when it comes to more modern mobile warfare.

As mobile warfare, including helicopters, continues to advance and modeling requires taking into account the improvements in communication and sensors in the 1960s and beyond, I foresee hitting big holes in what Command Ops can portray. And yet, there may continue to be a niche. Cold War era conflicts like the Iran-Iraq War also were also throwbacks to World War II weapons and technologies, so the engine might be a match for some other, later battles.

While creating the map may be the hardest part of the process, it may also be the most important when in comes to immersion and the fun factor. In this version of the scenario, failure to take the crossing seems almost meaningless. In the real battle, there was no bridge and there was no river. The opportunity for the player to connect with the historical circumstance is difficult unless the battlefield itself is actually recreated.

Clearly the advantage in Israeli gunnery and tactics is not property modeled. I used data for the German 75mm tank projectile, which does slightly outperform the Soviet guns. But it wasn’t enough. A good bit of tweaking is almost certainly in order here.

Hopefully I’ll find the wherewithal to work some more with this concept before I’m done. With a little bit of work, I think I could see much better results. Furthermore, the 1956 Arab-Israeli War in general is even more suited to Command Ops than this particular scenario. The use of paradrops to seize objectives, which then are rescued by mechanized forces, is very much the type of battle this series was originally designed to play.

*Regarding Battlefield Size and Duration. Since I set this up myself, it isn’t really representative. The map I used is much bigger that shown, but the roughly 40km x 12km rectangle is where all of the fighting will take place. Likewise the battle would never last for 12 hours of fighting. But I needed to set start and end times, so I just gave it most of the day.

Before heading into the 1956 Arab Israeli War, I’ll return to the scenario I looked at earlier. As I mentioned a subsequent post, there are two games that have redone the old Avalon Hill Arab Israeli Wars scenarios as computer scenarios.

The Kalkiliah scenario, which I recently fiddled with on the board, has been recreated both for Divided Ground and for WinSPMBT.

Apples to Apples, Dust to Dust

First to the Divided Ground scenario. Player Alan R. Arvold recreated The Arab Israeli Wars board game scenarios in the computer version. Even more valuable, his work is accompanied by extensive design notes discussing the conversion.

Looking very different.

While I haven’t done a hex-by-hex myself, based on his notes it would seem the designer made a significant effort to recreate the board designs from the original game. Nevertheless, my first thought on loading the Divided Ground scenario is how different the map looks represented shown as a 3D view as opposed to the abstract symbols upon a flat map from the original game.

Pretty much the same situation. Arab disposition is speculative, as the computer version has units hidden by fog-of-war.

The other major difference is described in the design notes for this scenario. As I stated in my notes on the board game, the key to this scenario is the complexity of the victory condition rules. In a nutshell, the scenario depicts an Israeli raid which initially attacks the town in superior numbers. The attackers are facing a company of regular infantry and police (represented in Arab Israeli Wars by commando units and in Divided Ground by militia). They must quickly take the police fort near the village, and preferably do so before the Jordanians bring the remainder of their infantry, transported on vehicles, into the fray. Once the police fort is captured, the Israelis must withdraw without suffering losses. Should they fail to do so, a rescue force with armor is added to the board and the game length is extended.

The Divided Ground engine does not support the capture-and-withdraw victory condition, so (as is apparent in the first screenshot) the town and fortress hexes are simply designated as standard victory point locations. Second, the conditional availability of the Israeli reinforcements cannot be programmed, so the scenario was created just to last for the longer number of turns, with the Israeli armor always being available.

The final big change from the board game is that the “Fort” counter in Arab Israeli Wars does not have an equivalent in Divided Ground. The scenario was created with a “trench” representing the defensive position. As said about the board game, it is the fort and its particularly powerful defensive capabilities that makes this scenario what it is. Downgrading to just a minor defensive improvement leaves the capture of the fort, in my opinion, so easy as to negate the intent of the scenario.

Assuming you are playing this scenario to replicate the board game feel, one might imagine enforcing the withdrawal condition voluntarily, and then ignoring the computer’s tally of victory points. Likewise, you would have to ignore the arrival of your reinforcements in any case where the prerequisites for the extended game were not met.

In contrast, I played the scenario straight through by the computer rules, ignoring what I knew from the board scenario. As expected, it is weighted overwhelmingly towards Israeli victory (whereas I think the original leans heavily towards the Arabs). I was able to capture the victory locations before the Jordanian reinforcements arrived, and then deployed my halftracks to defend the town from recapture. When my own reinforcements arrived, I used them to mop up the Jordanian forces almost to the man. Which was fun in its own way.

Without the super-defensive value of the fort, I’m not sure I see the point in trying to play by the other board scenario rules.

Just a Nod

Scale

The Arab-Israeli Wars

Hex side: 250 meters
Turn length: 6 minutes

Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank

Hex side: 50 meters
Turn length: 3 minutes

Recreating the toughness of the police fort is one thing that Steel Panthers was able to get right. Recreating the board game experience using this engine may not be a realistic goal given the difference in scale. The turn length is roughly 2-3 times and the map board at least double* when going from Steel Panthers to Arab Israeli Wars. It may have been feasible to, for example, model only the first half of the original scenario: A reduced unit count would have to take the police fort within the first half-hour or so, eliminating much of the reinforcements and the withdrawal condition. However, that’s not what was done.

Israeli paratroopers converging on the town. That fort will be one tough nut to crack.

A quick glance at the Steel Panther‘s scenario map indicates that, unlike the Divided Ground version, this was not an attempt to faithfully reproduce the Arab Israeli Wars map layout. More likely, it was based on the actual layout of the town and the surrounding terrain and roads.

Approximate size and location of the Steel Panthers game map, shown on a U.S. World War II -era map, with the bit that’s in the screenshot shown in black.

The construction of the scenario is that the full range of combatants are involved, but in the smaller time and space scale of Steel Panthers. The scenario starts with the Israeli paratroopers moving towards the town, but the Jordanian motorized units and then the Israeli armor are fairly quickly added to the mix.

Another interesting addition is that the Jordanians have a PzKpfw IV near the town (as an early reinforcement). Historically, the Jordanians did have some of these German WWII tanks, although not necessarily within 20 minutes of this particular fight.

The condensing of the scenario makes it another knife fight. As with the original board game version, the Israelis have superiority once they get all their equipment into the fight. For what it’s worth, I ended clearing the town completely, but gained only a marginal victory. I made some clearly stupid moves; exposing some halftracks to enemy anti-armor fire in one case and moving into artillery fire in two others.

As I’ve said in many of previous comparisons, the Steel Panthers version tends to be the most “fun” of the options. For this battle, moving individual units and trying to seize an actual building representing the police fortress gives me the best experience playing this battle. The interpretation of the battle is probably the least realistic of the three options, but I’m not sure that accuracy is a feature of any of these simulations.

This is a Part 2 of a two part post. Start with Part 1 here, if interested. In the previous installment, I focused on a 1955 World War III scenario in Germany. This second part moves elsewhere in the world.

As a rule, I don’t like to play a strategy game as I would a First Person Shooter. Running into a “gotcha,” then reloading and trying again and again may work for some typesof games, it ruins the mood for me in a historical strategy game.

Part of the historical flavor is that, while we may study the situation in detail, the commanders at the time had none of that hindsight. So any surprise that they faced at the time, to the extent that the game can model it, will be a surprise for we players only the first time through. Add to that the unpleasantness of playing the same thing over-and-over again, trying to get it right… it would seem more satisfying were we to expect a scenario to be a once-through affair.

One could make the counter argument that, as a virtual military person, your real life counterpart has undergone training well beyond even the most dedicated gamer. He knows his own people and platforms inside and out and has also studied the enemy. He may well have spent more time in preparation for an operation than you’re going to spend on the entire game (both in real and simulated time). In that way, playing and replaying a given scenario can be seen as an equivalent to the years of training and experience that precedes any battle.

Wherein I Completely Spoil The Surprise

At this point, I’m going to completely spoil the scenario Waller Takes Charge, from CMANO.

If not obvious from the intro, this one took me a few times to come close to getting right. And right from the get-go, I ran into a gotcha from the scenario maker (it’s a community-made scenario).

Briefly, the scenario places us in command of the Destroyer USS Waller, near Crete at the outbreak of World War III. Quite a bit of nastiness has preceded, leaving us in command of the air wings of the USS Intrepid. We are given the base at Souda Bay, on the northern coast of Crete, and tasked with finding the remaining Soviet ships in the Mediterranean, which are estimated to include a cruiser and at least two submarines.

Nuked! That can’t be good for morale.

The opening gotcha is that, while I am concentrating on figuring out what assets I’ve got and what I’m going to be able to do with them, unbeknownst to us all (well, if you haven’t been reading this, that is), the Soviets have a flight of four Tu-4 Bulls armed with nukes headed towards the airbase.

My first time through, I sent all my planes back to base, except for a mix of fighters and surveillance, which I sent to provide cover over the Waller and her sister ship DDE Cony. It wasn’t at all clear to me how much fuel I had, and I didn’t want to risk any losses through stupidly stranding my planes too far from my new base. It didn’t help that the planes were constantly complaining that I didn’t seem to know what I was doing, given that they’d already been given the “Return To Base” order at game start.

Is there a commander alive that, at the outset of hostilities, would not only fail to provide a defensive fighter patrol over his own base, but ensure that all his available aircraft are unavailable due to refueling and rearming? That’s essentially what I was doing and the scenario is designed to punish the player for focusing on the goal but ignoring defense. With no defense, those Tu-4s are going to mean an instant loss, even before the player gets started on his given mission – hunting for the Soviet ships.

Doing It Right

Having failed so obviously, it didn’t feel wrong at all to load up the game from the beginning and take the appropriate precautions.

Having done so (and having stopped the threat at the cost of a few fighters), it struck me that this was another easy scenario to throw together in IL-2.

As always, it surprises me when I achieve essentially the same result in IL-2 as I’ve just seen in CMANO. In this case, I was generally able to take out the incoming bombers, although generally losing 1 or 2 fighters in the process. It took me a couple play-throughs, but ultimately I managed to shoot down all of the incoming bombers and land my plane back on Crete.

Taking down one of the bombers with my FJ-3 Fury.

The maps for the vicinity of Crete, complete with airbases, are all available among the various on-line IL-2 content. A little searching can spruce up the basic models for the aircraft with nice paint jobs. However, there was one piece of the CMANO scenario I could not bring over to IL-2. In the larger battle, I was using a mix of FJ-3 Furies and F2H-2 Banshees to defend the base. The latter plane, unfortunately, is not available in the jets package that I’m using. So my defense had all three defenders flying FJ-3s.

That wasn’t very sporting. As a last flip of the finger, the dying bomber unloads its nuke. They didn’t do that in CMANO

As far as I can tell, my fighter losses in CMANO to the Tu-4 attack were all from the Bulls’ defensive gunnery. That was also true in IL-2; Approach the bombers too slowly, especially from the lower rear, and I’d find myself riddled with bullets. However, in every attempt I also lost either my own plane, or my wingman’s, to the nuclear blast caused by the bomber discharging its ordnance before crashing. It makes me wonder if that was actually doctrine, either from the Soviets or the U.S.? Particularly during the 1950s when the fallout fear was less than later decades. In this particular scenario, I guess it is a smart move. A bomb detonated over open sea has little effect except to take out one or two enemy planes.

But I Digress

Back in CMANO, having successfully defended my base, I tried again to focus on the mission and find the Russian subs. Once again, I was caught in another stupid mistake due to lack of attention. While I was focused on directing my air units, the Waller and the Russian counterpart drifted into range of each other and began firing. While initially panicked, I realized that I was, by far, getting the better of the situation. Unfortunately, what I didn’t watch for is that the enemy cruiser, while farther away, had a longer range on her guns, which were also considerably more deadly than the destroyer gunnery.

Found you! I’ve managed to pick up the location of the Soviet Cruiser Kuybyshev and it’s Destroyer escort. Those are my two destroyers, in blue. The green is neutral merchant shipping. It wouldn’t do to nuke them.

That prompted another reload. This time through, I concentrated on making sure I could bring everything to bear simultaneously against the Kuybyshev. I held my ships out of range until I had all my aircraft rearmed, and then moved in closer to hopefully support the results of my air attack. That’s when I found out several other pieces of information, (which a responsible commander would have known up front) the hard way.

Regular bombs (unless they are coming from enemy planes against your own ships, apparently) are fairly ineffective against moving ships. The only damage I seemed to do was with my final attack run where I used rockets. Also, the Soviet ships have a speed advantage. Keeping just out of range when the Russians want to close is not an option. Finally, the Egyptians, neutral at the start of the scenario, have an unexpected way of negating our air superiority.

Time for another reload.

At this point, I’m going to give this scenario a break. This reminded me how difficult many of the CMANO scenarios can be – in some cases puzzle-like in their solution. From the orders, one would assume the U.S. has a superiority in forces, that being a requirement to accomplish the states goals. Typically the hunter is the hunter because of his ability to outgun the hunted. However, without some clever planning, the superiority may actually be with the Soviets in this one. If so, it may be that only careful application of your available weapons, in just the right time and place, will allow you to overcome the otherwise impossible mission. Yes, this is an interesting problem for the commander. But it is less interesting if the nature of the threats, and the thus the combination of tactics to defeat them, is only known through multiple playthroughs.

As I started out, I find that frustrating in a strategy game.

Other Armies, Other Fronts

Just so I’m not left with no accomplishments, I also took on a another Steel Panthers scenario. This one, titled Assault Gun Support, imagines that World War III has spread in the opposite direction, to the north. The scenario is a counter attack with Swedish infantry supported by assault guns against the Soviet aggressors (also supported by assault guns).

As always, fairly enjoyable gameplay. Also, as usually happens, I make my share of dumb mistakes. This time, I lost nearly all of my assault guns in the opening minutes. But the difference is I don’t feel the need to reload and restart just to make it through the scenario. I can live and learn, and maybe accept that I coulda/shoulda/woulda done better than that draw, without having to whittle away at the scenario until I “beat” it.

Once again hoping to find some tactical goodness in the Korean war, I return to the period of the Inch’on landings.

Tank Country

The game Panzer Elite was released in 1999. It was a Tank command simulator covering battles between the Germans and the Americans from 1943 through the end of the war. At the time it came out, it pushed the limits of technology both graphically and in terms of the realism of the simulation. The player commands a platoon of tanks on a battlefield that includes armor, infantry, and artillery (both enemy and friendly).

In the 17 years it has been out, fans of the game have continued to play and modify the original release. Mods have enhanced the graphics and the realism, as well as expanded the scope of the original game to include the whole time period of the second world war as well as more of the major belligerents on the Western Front.

I picked up the game for the first time very recently. It sells on GOG for under $3 when on sale. The download includes the original “Special Edition” version that came out in 2001, as well as a number of user-made mods. In trying to quickly search for the “right” mod package to start with, I stumbled across a Korean War mod package.

As I’ve pointed out in earlier posts, the Korean War equipment was often the same as, or at least only minor upgrades from, World War II equipment. Thus, Korean War scenarios should be easily buildable using the Russian Front expansion mods, simply pitting the Americans against the Soviets.

A fine idea, but still not quite fully implemented as far as I can tell. The mod’s scenarios are the original Panzer Elite scenarios, except with the North Koreans swapped in for the Germans. I played the first Inch’on landing scenario, which was actually the same as the Anzio landing scenario with units correct for the period substituted in.

“…and the Inch’on bridgehead was held for the price of a few hundred ordinary lives.”

Playing the original and the Korean version side-by-side, it seems that not everything works in the Korean mod. In the original Anzio, my supporting infantry immediately take up positions whereas in Korea they seem to be frozen in place.

In contrast, when I create an “instant action” scenario, there does seem to be functioning infantry. Instant action is, in my mind, second best to well-designed hand-crafted scenarios – obviously for historical reasons- but also, it seems that the instant action game truly throws you instantly into the action. My first try started with the opposing forces in contact and firing on each other from the open.

The tools to create scenarios exist, although at first glance it looks daunting. Not the kind of thing where I could throw together a quick Korean village and have a shootout in a few clicks.

Unlike other options, the Panzer Elite mod does seem to include the major tank types. In playing the U.S. forces at Inch’on, I am equipped with the M26. The program is praised for its accurate simulation of armor, and I assume that extends to the Korean war era tanks as they are minor variations of those modeled already. The infantry seems largely useful as target practice. I’ve yet to see the use of bazookas or anti-tank rifles (although that doesn’t mean they are not there). I have seen infantry occupying buildings, so it is possible that with the right setup, AI infantry could be used to model an ambush on the player’s armor.

There seem to be some additional UI factors giving me problems that I don’t see on youtube videos of gameplay. The use of the mouse to select things doesn’t seem to work as it should. Pressing the right mouse button seems to work only occasionally, often taking back to the center of the screen. Even more occasionally, it gives unknown commands to my “wingmen” (the other tanks under my command in my platoon.) The map function has horrible graphics, perhaps even by 1999 standards, and also seems to suffer by a partially working mouse.

All in all, I think Panzer Elite shows some potential for this purpose, but potential that I’ll likely never exploit. Without an existing base of period scenarios, I’ve got quite a learning curve ahead of me. First fixing UI bugs, then learning the scenario editor – not to mention learning the UI itself. Like so many simulation programs, all the commands need to be learned afresh. While I do plan to explore a little more, I don’t expect to find what I’m searching for.

Seoul Searching

Needing a quick fix, I returned some more scenarios from WinSPMBT.

This one models the days before the assault on Seoul post Inch’on landing. The U.S Marines are closing in on the city, and the North Korean’s have launched an early morning counter attack just west of Seoul.

The Marines have set up an ambush for the North Korean counter attack. It is working.

I left the minmap in the screenshot to try to give some perspective on the location of the encounter. One thing I find particularly fascinating is to look at the Google Map of this area today. What used to be small villages is now a heavily industrialized urban area.

There is also a scenario modeling combat in the heart of Seoul’s urban area (circa 1950). It provides what I expect from U.S. Cold War operations. Massive superiority and virtually unlimited fire support versus an entrenched enemy with prepared positions and booby traps. Nothing else I’ve looked at came close to giving me what I was expecting.

I’m advancing on the North Korean’s positions, trying to keep my combined forces combined. Easier said than done.

WinSPMBT remains the most fun of any of my options at this point. It almost manages to strike a balance between historical fidelity, realistic modeling and ease-of-use. Almost, but better than the alternatives.

I… WANT… TO… FLY… JETS!

Finally, I returned to IL-2 and support of these same late-September operations from the air. Unfortunately, I’m just not much of a virtual pilot – more likely to put my jet into a spin as actually take down an enemy. That aside, the Jet Age mod provides a handful of pre-configured scenarios with exactly what I was looking for. The scenarios involve flying F9F Panthers off of a carrier for both air superiority and ground support missions.

In my previous post, I found that the Theatre of War 3: Korea package didn’t quite measure up. Yet it seemed close enough that perhaps there is a possibility of redemption. Many of my criticisms were a function of scenario design, and so I wanted to look into putting together a historical scenario and if that improves my opinion.

To help out, I go to a game that, despite its age, is still one of the best treatments of this level of tactical warfare available. I am speaking of Steel Panthers. In one of its current incarnations, Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank, the second scenario is a potential test for for my ideas.

The battlefield focuses on a ridge between two low-lying areas of rice farming. The North Korean invaders had crossed the Naktong River, where the armies of the South were holding a defensive perimeter centered at the city of Pusan. The ridge at Obong-Ni was a natural defensive point and became the focus of intense fighting over the course of several battles in August and September of 1950. From a wargaming standpoint, these battles were an inflection point, where the U.S. Marines began turning their desperate defensive position into an offensive to retake South Korea.

The particular focus of this scenario on the first hour of the North Korean counter-offensive on August 17th. The communists had overwhelming numbers as well as superiority across different weapon classes (advantages in artillery and armor as well). The advantage wasn’t to last. As the US was able to bring up both superior numbers and weapons, they were able to overwhelm the Korea positions and force them back across the river within a matter of days. In this brief snapshot of the battle, however, the Marines were attempting to turn back an assault with T-34s using bazookas and Recoilless Rifles. However, the U.S./UN had air superiority. The Marines’ advantage is that, while they are likely unable to stop the enemy tanks on their own, they can call in airstrike after airstrike.

Pixelated Soldiers of a Forgotten War

Amazingly, before this exercise, I’ve never played Steel Panthers. The game itself is old enough to drink, having been released by SSI in 1995 (see timeline here).

I think I initially didn’t get it because of the price. Later, it began to look dated and criticisms of the computer opponent and “gaminess” deterred me. Even when the price was “nothing,” there was some on-line arguing about the functionality of the game and whether it actually ran properly. Long story short, I never got the game until just now when I wanted a comparison scenario.

I’m playing with the free version, which has a limited resolution. The choice is either to have a very small window that graphically looks decent, but is kind of hard for me to see text and other details – or to run it in full screen mode where, to quote someone far more articulate than I am, it “looks like every element on the screen was printed with a boiled potato.” I haven’t done enough to really evaluate the AI, but I’ll assume from the on-line criticism it remains a weakness. Nevertheless, in many ways Steel Panthers has yet to be surpassed for what it does. It provides a highly historical (see previous) treatment of small-unit action from World War II through to the present. It does so with a wealth of available scenarios, a battle generator, and editing tools that are limited only by the skills of the program’s fans. I won’t dwell too much on either the game system or this scenario, but I’m sure I’ll be back to it later.

I will mention a couple things that really stood out as I played this. The system seems to have struck a pretty good balance between simplicity and realism. The number of “attacks” per turn feels pretty decent, while “defensive fire” is completely automated (subject to user-defined parameters). It’s slow compared to the more-modern “real time” systems, but better than most out there. Second – smoke. The computer uses smoke to mask its movements both retreating and attacking. This is one of the few games I’ve seen it used properly. I also like the mechanic where sustained firing on a defending hex creates smoke, which then obscures future shots into and through the hex. I’m sure it has been done elsewhere, but it hit me as something I hadn’t seen before.

Observation point, village center, and the northern point of the defensive ridge. The graphics look much better in windowed mode than distorted to fit a full screen at modern resolution

Tank Country

Initially, the UN troops found themselves facing North Korean armor with infantry, generally a distinct disadvantage. One of the reasons is that the American high command didn’t consider Korea to be “tank country,” and so neglected to deploy armor formations. The necessity of countering T 34/85 attacks made them rethink that position.

The first step in creating the battle was to recreate the battlefield. One of the reasons I chose this particular battle is there are multiple sources available to recreate the battle down to the level of detail necessary for the Theatre of War engine.

My first thought was to attempt to edit terrain in one of the existing maps. The game comes with a map editor, which appears to support tools for everything from creating a new map from scratch to editing an existing one. Unfortunately, there is no documentation so I simply tried everything. As far as I can tell, the basic terrain cannot be modified. Terrain height and type appear to be fixed on the provided maps, essentially limiting all scenarios to the nine provided maps. This also seems to apply to the trees, for which an extensive set of menu options exist, but all appear to do nothing.

What is editable are the roads, and what they call “statics,” basically buildings and trenches. Add to this that the each map is actually larger than the playing area, and there is some variation to be had. The terrain can be repositioned within the battlefield window and then the villages, roads, etc. moved to create a wide variety of setups.

So my next step was to find some terrain that seem to approximate the battlefield in question, and then reposition roads, trenches and buildings to get something semi-historic. The process was tedious, but not impossible.

The battlefield taken from a military map from the period. The ridge is the series of crests following the dot-dash line passing diagonally through the center of this picture.

A sketch of the battlefield showing troop positions and movements. Note that this map is rotated about 40 degrees from North-South so that the ridge is straight up-and-down on the map. Also, the arrows depict troop movements from after the scenario we are modeling. (https://www.koreanwar.org)

Google map version of roughly the same terrain as in the first map is enlightening about the actual terrain. Ridges alternate with low-lying rice-farm valleys.

Steel Panthers scenario, initial positions, zoomed out to match the other views.

With all this material to work with, I thought I had done pretty well at reproducing it on my TOW3 map.

From the air, I felt I had the gist of the battle taken care of, if I ignore the mountain where the second ridge should be.

Once I zoomed into the ground level view, however, it was clear to me that while the map may look fine, the terrain I was working with was far from what I was trying to model.

Down in the trenches, that isn’t really much of a ridge, now is it?

What looked like a good-enough approximation of the historic ridge line was really just a patch of rough terrain that really did nothing to block sight lines. The entire battlefield has pretty good Line Of Sight from one end to the other, meaning that as soon as I start running, everyone starts shooting at everyone else.

The TOW3 scenarios I’ve played start out with opposing forces separated by those large mountains you see in the background. If everyone starts out on the same side of those mountains, there does not seem to be much to limit contact.

Still, this is a learning exercise so, aside from the lost effort of placing all those trenches, what else did I learn. Is there still hope?

The next step, having created my terrain, was the placement of the forces. I started with the American side, and was able to mostly recreate the forces defending the ridge, as provided by the Steel Panthers order of battle. I left out the reinforcements scheduled to arrive through the scenario and also limited the off-board artillery and air support to what fit into the TOW3 editors parameters. But having got things pretty close to how I wanted them, I moved on to set up the North Korean attack.

And found that any more than about 3 tanks and a couple of mortars maxed out the unit allowance.

I’ve seen video of large numbers of units on screen at any one time. So the unit limit is likely in the editor and not the game. The game comes with, in addition to the map editor, an “Editor” and a “Simple Editor” for creating scenarios. I’ve used the “Simple Editor” in this. The battle itself is saved in an XML file, so there seem to be ways around the limit if needed.

But again, still a learning exercise. So I decided to scale down the scenario to the first 20 minutes, and exclude everything that wasn’t either initially on the front lines (for the U.S.) or in the first wave (for the North Koreans).

Even with my best efforts, I still couldn’t populate the North Korean side with enough for their human-wave style attacks. The key challenge of this scenario, however, are the North Korean T-34s, so I focused on getting the tank and mortar count right.

Upon running the scenario, the terrain problems were immediately apparent. I had placed the North Korea infantry at the far edge of the map, intending them to provide indirect fire (as in the SP scenario). I did not build any defensive system for them, which meant they were immediately targeted and fairly quickly destroyed. Absent any ability to alter terrain, it may be possible to shield indirect fire units with a combination of trenches and buildings, which can be moved in the editor.

In the Steel Panther’s scenario, the infantry advanced to a point where smoke could be targeted, which then covered the final advance. In the TOW3 version, the advancing infantry was both fewer in number and without terrain cover, and was eliminated before closing. The armor, on the other hand, had similar feel in both games – pretty much immune to infantry. One different was the U.S. recoiless rifle. Not effective against tanks in SP but deadly in TOW3.

Overall, the inability to add off-board support except through “purchases” limits the ability to get the historical situation correct. U.S. superiority via artillery and in the air is a key component of any Cold War or Modern conflict. On board artillery is an option, although that exacerbates the until limitation issue. In my setup, I added two 155mm howitzers to substitute for the missing off-board options. It should have been two 155mm batteries.

Furthermore, the on-board artillery seems to have targeting problems. As nearly as I can figure, the problem is that artillery cannot fire indirect under several circumstances. If the guns are loaded with direct-fire ammunition (i.e. AP shells), they cannot target indirect fire until the loaded ammunition is discharged at a direct fire target. Secondly, if the guns can shoot at targets directly, it seems that they will not fire indirectly. Or maybe not. Whenever I think I have it figured out, I seem to quickly find holes in my explanations. I can say it is very difficult to target the enemy with indirect howitzer fire, although indirect mortar fire and off-board artillery fire will work in the same circumstances.

The manual is of limited use. There are a few bits and pieces of information, but not the kind of detail necessary to resolve the problems I have. The manual seems primary written to explain the intricacies of armor penetration modeling. I assume the details are because the models are, in fact, implemented in the game, although even that wasn’t entirely clear. While it is nice to know that your game has high-fidelity models, the actual effect on gameplay (the experience of playing) would seem to be minimal.

Other Battles, Other Shortcomings

Following my Obong-Ni Ridge scenario, I looked at some of the other Steel Panther scenarios created for this same time frame. That is, the beginning of the U.S. offensive in the fall of 1950. I have not yet tried to implement matching TOW3 scenarios.

A few parting thoughts.

The units and weapons available in TOW3 are “representative” rather than exhaustive. Meaning, creating a historically accurate battle will almost certainly involve some substitutions. In all of the SP scenarios that I’m looking at, the U.S. Marines are using the M26 Pershing. This vehicle was already out-of-date at the start of the Korean War, but as the Marines were caught with a shortage of armor (because Korea wasn’t really tank country), they were forced to use what was available. In TOW3, one can use the M4 (Sherman) or the M46 (Patton). Only.

One of the available SP scenarios is very similar to what the automated Mission Builder will create in TOW3. The U.S. is move a small, mixed armor and infantry force along a road with poor sight lines and a village. Along that road, the North Koreans have units set up for an ambush. The U.S. has no air or artillery to call in. If there were a bit more customization capability to the TOW3 Mission generator, a satisfying approximation could be created. However, if I want strictly limit the types of units, I’d probably need to create the mission in the editor. I have yet to do so.

Another one of the SP missions involves repelling an assault on the recently recaptured Kimpo airport. The Steel Panthers documentation is lacking in this case, but it would seem to be a night action. Visibility is restricted to 150 yards, meaning the large flat ground of the airport does not allow engagement at a distance. This is another shortcoming of the TOW3 engine in which the variations in weather conditions seem, to me, to impact only the lighting effects rather than actual game play.

The last scenario I tried in Steel Panthers was simulating an island landing, securing the harbor in preparation for the main Inch’on landings. It served as an illustration of how much is missing from TOW3. The scenario uses landing craft to place the U.S. Marines on the board and massive naval artillery bombardment to prepare the ground. The available air assets exceed my ability to properly use them, and there are also spotter aircraft both off board and on board (a helicopter). On the North Korean side, there are a variety of defensive positions, bunkers, caves and other cover as well as terrain that prevents the Marines from engaging at a safe distance. The size of the battlefield and the numbers engaged also clearly exceed what I could do with TOW3.

While I wouldn’t expect TOW3 to do all these things, its inability to do most of them points to why I have to, despite giving TOW3 a second chance, once again withhold a mark of approval.